Holy Fire

device out of her head, but she accepted the tickling penetration, shivering on the spot.

“[It has no battery,]” Benedetta told her in Italiano. “[You have to keep the bird warmed by your skin at all times. If she ever gets cold, the bird will die.]”

The new translator had a wonderful flutelike resonance, a tiny piping right next to the surface of her right eardrum. “But it’s so lovely! So clear!”

“Remember—no battery.”

“No battery. Okay. But that seems like an odd oversight.”

“That’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” Benedetta said glumly. “That bird is a shareware device. The Swiss weren’t missing any tricks when they built it.”

Maya clipped the diamond chain around her neck, and tucked it beneath her blouse. She couldn’t help but feel pleased. “You’re very generous. Would you like my Deutsch translator?”

Benedetta looked it over. “Deutsch-to-English. I can’t use this. It’s tourist kitsch.” She tossed it back. “[Now we can talk like civilized people. Show us your palazzo.]”

“I certainly hope this works.” Maya traced her passtouch into the glossy surface of the woven computer. “Are my gloves turned on?”

“[Something is processing,]” Benedetta diagnosed skeptically.

Bouboule pulled on a pair of exquisitely tailored lemon yellow smartgloves and carefully adjusted her spex. “This is so exciting. Patapouff and I love memory palaces. Don’t we, Pouff-pouff?”

Maya tensed in expectation that the monkey would speak aloud. The monkey said nothing. Maya forced herself to relax. Talking dogs were okay. There was definitely something awful about monkeys.

A blurry test pattern appeared on Maya’s spex. She ran her finger along the stem of the right eyepiece until the pattern focused and clarified. She pressed the nosebridge to bring the depth in. These were habitual gestures, little technical actions she’d been doing for decades, but she felt a sudden thrill. Her astigmatism was all gone. Her astigmatism was entirely cured, and until this instant she had never managed to miss it.

“[It’s an office!]” Benedetta said triumphantly. “[Such a strange old office! I’ll navigate, okay?]”

“A man’s office,” Bouboule said, bored.

“[Where does this man keep his pornography?]” Benedetta asked.

“What?” Maya said.

“[You never found his pornography? There’s not a man alive who doesn’t hide pornography in his memory palazzo.]”

“He’s not alive,” Maya said.

Bouboule said something wicked, and laughed. “A pun in Francais,” the bird translator fluted, in its sweet but peculiarly characterless English. “The context is not understood.”

“[I see here the big blueprint,]” said Benedetta, examining one wall. “[The sixties, eh? They built like maniacs then. Library. Gallery. Artificial Life Zoo—that sounds good! Business records. Health records. CAD-CAM pattern storage.] ‘Movies.’ Are there movies in this place?”

“What is that word, ‘movies’?” Bouboule said.

“Cinematographique. ”

“Prima!”

“[Tailor’s measurements … tincture recipes. House plans. Oh, that’s very nice! To keep your physical house plans inside your palazzo. Three or four different houses! This man must have been quite rich.]”

“He was rich several different times,” Maya said.

“[Oh, look at this thing! He had a ptydepe tracker.]”

“What’s a ptydepe?” Maya said.

Benedetta, forced into technical definitions, switched to English again. “A Public Telepresence Point, a PTP. He has—he had—a scanner-collator that could sample public telepresence records. Good for tracking friends. Or enemies. The program will sample millions of public telepresence records for years, cataloging appearances of the target person. It’s a dataminer. Industrial Spyware.”

“Illegal?” Bouboule asked with interest.

“Probably. Maybe not, when he had it built.”

“Why do you call it a ‘ptydepe’?” Maya said.

“Ptydepe, that’s what they always call the PTPs here in Praha.… It’s such a strange language, Czesky.”

“Czesky is not the noun,” said Bouboule helpfully. “Czesky is only the, what-you-call, adverb. The proper name of the language is Czestina.”

“Czestina is egg number twelve, Maya.”

“Thank you,” Maya said.

She felt tiny paws stealthily creeping into her sleeve. Maya shrieked and yanked her spex off.

The monkey, alarmed, leapt back to the safety of Bouboule’s shoulder, where it revealed a rack of needlelike teeth.

Bouboule, blinded to reality by her spex, groped gently in midair. “Bad tactility?”

“Bad old protocols,” Benedetta said, similarly blinded.

Maya glared silently at the monkey’s silver-capped eyeballs. “Touch me again and I’ll whack you,” she mouthed silently. The monkey adjusted its tuxedo lapels, flicked its prehensile tail, and jumped off the back of the couch.

“I found an access!” Benedetta said. “Let’s go up to the roof!”

Maya put on her spex again. Doors shunted aside in the wall. They entered a virtual darkness. White rings ran past them downward, like galloping zebra stripes.

They emerged on a crenellated rooftop. Fake gravel underfoot.

And there were other memory palaces. Warshaw’s partners in crime perhaps? She could not understand why people running memory palaces would want to make their premises visible to one another. Was it somehow reassuring to see that other people were hiding here as well? Rising in the horizon- warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidian distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness … A smooth and elegantly gilled construction with a mushroom’s sloping tip, fibrous at the bottom, columnar and veiny up the sides. Another palace like a honeycomb set on end, surrounded by hundreds of motes all slowly flying and detaching and absorbing, like a dovecote for virtual pterodactyls.

“What a strange metaphor,” said Bouboule, thrilled. “I’ve never seen a virtuality this old that is still functional.”

“I wonder where we are,” Maya said. “I mean, I wonder where on earth all this is running.”

“This might not represent real processing,” Benedetta said. “This looks fantastic, but it could be the tripes of one little machine in a closet somewhere in Macau. You must never trust the presentation. Through another interface, this might look very quotidian and bourgeois.”

“Don’t be such a mule, Benedetta,” said Bouboule, excited. “Gerontocrats don’t live that way! No man who owned a place like this would come here just to fool his own eyes. This is an old man’s soulscape. An exclusive resort! A criminal enclave.”

“I wonder if any of these strange places are still inhabited. Maybe they are all dead, and still running on automatic. They are haunted castles in virtual sand.”

“Don’t talk that way,” Maya said tightly.

“Let’s fly!” Benedetta leapt gracefully from the edge of the parapet.

The spex went dark.

Benedetta gasped. “Oh! Pity! That broke the contact.”

They took their spex off, and gazed at one another silently.

“How did you come to own this palace?” Bouboule said at last.

“Don’t ask,” said Benedetta.

“Oh.” Bouboule smiled. “Did the old man leave you money, I hope?”

“If he did, I never found the treasure,” Maya said, folding her spex. “Not yet, anyway.” She tried to give the spex back.